At CES I noted that the new Aorus 15 gaming laptop appeared to have some nice cooling,
so let’s test it out and see just how hot it gets. I’ll be taking a detailed look
at the thermals and overclocking, and seeing how much we can improve performance by undervolting
and tweaking fan speed.
I’ve got the Aorus 15-W9, which means there’s an Intel i7-8750H CPU and Nvidia RTX 2060
graphics, however the 15-X9 model is also available with RTX 2070 graphics, so expect
different results with that one.
On the bottom of the laptop we can see we’ve got quite a large air intake vent which is
great to see. The rubber feet also seem to be angled such that they block the hot air
being exhausted from coming straight back into the fans, so air should only be pulled
in from the front. There are also quite a few heatpipes here, and some are shared between
both processor and graphics, so a change in one component will affect the other, for instance
if the CPU gets hot the graphics will be affected as a result.
I’ll also briefly talk about Gigabyte’s new AI feature that comes with their new RTX
laptops. There are two modes, AI Edge and AI Cloud. AI Edge processes the data locally
to make the best decisions in terms of what to change like fan speeds, power limits and
clock speeds, while the AI Cloud setting will send data to Microsoft and get the best settings
for the workload based on other user submitted data, so I’m expecting it to perform better.
Otherwise all other tests had the AI disabled unless stated otherwise. Thermal testing was
completed with an ambient room temperature of 24 degrees Celsius.
There’s a lot of data here, CPU temperatures are shown by the blue bars and GPU temperatures
are shown by the green bars. The gaming tests towards the bottom were tested by playing
Watch Dogs 2, as I find it to use a good amount of combined processor and graphics resources,
while the stress tests were tested by running the Aida64 stress test and the Heaven benchmark
at the same time in order to attempt to fully load the system.
The idle temperatures are a little warm at the bottom of the graph, however the fans
were basically silent. The temperatures aren’t too hot in gaming once you increase the fan
speed or undervolt the CPU. I’m using a -0.15v undervolt on the CPU, as denoted by
UV on the graph, while the GPU overclock, listed by OC, was a +150MHz to the GPU core.
In this case I also wasn’t seeing much of a difference between gaming at stock or with
the AI features. At the top of the graph once I started using a cooling pad I saw fairly
big improvements to temperatures, it seems to be making a larger difference because of
the big opening on the bottom of the laptop, which assists with airflow.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. Overall the results
were pretty good, while there was CPU throttling without the undervolt, the clock speeds aren’t
too low even while under stress test. With the stress tests running and laptop at stock
there was both thermal and power limit throttling, as we saw in the last graph this test got
the CPU to the hottest point of 96 degrees Celsius, however the thermal throttling could
be removed by maxing out the fan. The default 52 watt TDP limit was now being hit, resulting
in power limit throttling, however as we can see with the undervolt applied we’re able
to get the full 3.9GHz all core turbo speed of the i7-8750H even in this worst case scenario,
impressive stuff. It was also possible to boost the power limit up to 62 watts manually
with Intel XTU, however that would also have raised the temperatures, so I didn’t take
that route and instead went with undervolting.
These are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any
GPU load. Despite there being less load on the system as the graphics are not contributing
heat into the system or drawing as much power as before, the clock speeds are about the
same as with the CPU and GPU stress test running. With the undervolt applied it was possible
to get full performance from this test and remove the power limit throttling. These are
the temperatures from these CPU only tests, with the undervolt the temperature dropped
by 5 degrees Celsius while also giving us better performance.
To demonstrate how this translates into performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here.
There’s basically no difference in single core as that’s not enough to trigger throttling,
however in the multicore test we can see a nice improvement once undervolting the CPU,
as this helps alleviate the power limit throttling. Again I could have boosted the TDP limit instead
to achieve this, but then it would have run hotter.
Here are the GPU only clock speeds while under a graphical only stress test, as well as the
improvements seen by applying a 150MHz overclock to the core with MSI Afterburner. The overclock
resulted in a small temperature change of 1 degree Celsius, although there was power
limit throttling in both tests.
So how does this performance boost actually translate into games? I’ve tested with the
exact same Windows, Nvidia and game updates installed, the only changes were the ones
listed here.
Far Cry 5 was tested using the built in benchmark at 1080p with ultra settings. Down the bottom
at stock with the fan at default or max there was no real difference, as there wasn’t
thermal throttling here. With the AI settings there was a fair improvement to 1% low results,
but only a small increase to average FPS. Finally at the top with my custom manual settings
I was able to get the highest average FPS, so the AI settings did improve performance
over stock, but if you know what you’re doing you can extract extra performance.
The Aorus Control Center software has some options to help improve performance easily
too without the need for other third party tools. For instance by setting the graphics
to one we get a 100MHz boost to the GPU core and a 160MHz boost to the GPU memory, while
the different settings for the CPU will adjust the power limit. No undervolting appears to
happen, however by default the CPU TDP was 52 watts on the 3rd setting which is where
I’ve done all my testing, by setting it to the highest setting it gets boosted to
57 watts. Setting it to 2 puts the CPU TDP to 45w, as per the Intel spec for the 8750H,
while 1 lowers this further to 38 watts and 0 drops it all the way to 30 watts, so less
performance but could be worth changing when on battery power to make it last longer.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
got to the mid 30s in the center, about average. While gaming it was in the low 40s, while
the WASD keys were quite cool comparatively, then slightly cooler under stress tests, which
makes sense as there was some CPU throttling in Watch Dogs 2, more on that in a moment.
While gaming on battery power the wrist rest area got hotter than before, with the hot
spot on the left exactly where the battery is located.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was almost completely silent. While gaming or under stress test with the fans
on default speeds it was fairly loud, above average when compared to many other laptops
with the fans on max speed. When you manually boost the fans though it gets very loud, both
fans spin up to 7200 RPM, but as we’ve seen before this can improve the cooling a fair
bit, so it’s nice to have as option.
While the gaming performance seems pretty good, there was some current limit throttling
in some of the CPU heavy games, not something I usually see. I think this points to the
180 watt power brick not being adequate enough, at least with some of the more CPU heavy games.
We can see an example here, while just driving around in Watch Dogs 2 the TDP dips to 25
watts at times which frame rate lowers performance, and this seems to be why some games in my
gaming tests have lower 1% low results than expected.
Overall the temperatures seemed reasonable, still a little warm on the CPU at times though
considering how much of an opening we’ve got down the bottom and how loud the fans
can get, although as we saw we could really take advantage of this with a cooling pad.
The power limit throttling in some CPU heavy games was a bit strange, I would have thought
the 180 watt brick would be enough, given the other 2060 laptop I’ve tested with the
same i7 CPU also had a 180 watt power brick and I didn’t see these issues there, and
I don’t have any other larger bricks at the moment to test with to rule the issue
out. The battery doesn’t drain at all though while plugged into power, the performance
just lowers instead.
These differences in performance shown aren’t hard and fast rules, there are different factors
which will vary results, primarily the temperature of the room you’re running in, application
of thermal paste, and even the specific hardware which comes down to the silicon lottery. You
may not be able to undervolt or overclock your hardware the same as me, it depends on
the chip and its specific power requirements, so don’t just blindly copy my settings and
do some testing to find out where your stable point is for best results.
It may be possible to further improve temperatures by swapping the thermal paste, however as
this is a review unit that I have to send back I’m not able to change the paste, otherwise
the next reviewer will unknowingly report different results due to what I’ve done.
Undervolting, raising the fan speed or even just using a cooling pad to improve air flow
is much easier for most people to do, and as we've seen it did improve performance in
the Aorus 15.
Let me know how much of a performance boost you’ve found by undervolting your hardware
and what you thought of the improvements here, and course don’t forget to subscribe for
the full review of the Aorus 15 gaming laptop, as well as future tech videos like this one.